Time heals all wounds.
That’s what they say when they don’t know how to keep your blood inside your body, or how to sew up the exit wound of a cannonball — when they want to save you but they don’t know how. They aren’t wrong, entirely. Of course time lessons her anguish, because the passing of time brought with it the eradication of memory.
Because at first you remember everything. Even if it kills you, you remember the way that last breath rattles from their lungs and the exact moment that you notice for the first time they’re no longer breathing. You remember the way that the angle of their neck was jarring, and the way that they couldn’t possibly almost be sleeping because their eyes are still halfway open in a vacant stare you’ve never seen before. Every detail is a grain of sand, and you’re alone on a beach and for miles and miles and miles there’s nothing else but sand.
And time is like the tide. It reels them back into the ocean, grain by grain — because next you can’t remember what the last conversation you had together was. You can’t remember how many flecks of green were there in the fractures of her irises, and you know that her skin smelled like something beautiful, but you used to say that it was lemon balm and now the words escape you. That was the problem with the way that time healed.
Grain by grain you lose them.
Grain by grain until there’s nothing left.
Maybe one day they would both shed these skins, molt their anguish like the birds did their feathers in the springtime — but Eilidh isn’t ready yet.
He tells her it’s a long story, and what she keeps to herself is that she wouldn’t mind hearing it if he tells it the way he seems to say most things; kindly, and with humor. In the moonlight she can see his eyes each time that they cloud, though, and she doesn’t fault him for not diving deeper.
“I’ve spent most of my life looking for this place — for Beqanna.”
She smiles gently at the irony of that. Eilidh has spent what seemed like most of her trying to leave it behind. When he tells her about his parents she smiles softly in comradery, and says: “My mother and I used to bathe in the river here. I think it’s beautiful still.”
It’s all she can bring herself to admit while she’s careful to mind the floodgates; the ones that keep her sorrows tucked safely under her skin — the ones that would drown them both if they were to break.
“Is it freeing to have finally found what you’ve been searching for all these years?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Lydia] I won't apologize for how obnoxiously fast I wrote this. :|